Distributed Twitter

[andrewducker]

Can anyone see a way that a distributed Twitter could work?

Obviously you could use RSS to aggregate tweeters you like into one place - but that only covers very basic functionality.  For instance, I can't see a way to both decentralise it _and_ allow for hashtag filtering over the whole database to find the tweets you like.

Any thoughts?

Comments

[matgb]

But you don't need every site to ping every other site.

You need to have a couple sites that aggregate pings to other search engines and possibly feed portals. Your site would be grabbing feeds from your subscriptions and would pick up on everything in there, and everything else would come from a search engine—which release feeds of the results so you'd get your @replies anyway.

You choose your search engine(s), they sort out the pinging APIs between them.

[andrewducker]

You need every producing site to ping every search site. Which also means they all have to keep track of every search site out there. Or have an automated method for search sites to register interest. Hmm, that might work.

This means that the search sites end up with copies of everything, but that's not the end of the world - it does mean the producers don't need to have copies of everything.

Ok, I can see that working. What we need is a protocol for makign data available and registering to be informed of updates.

Of course, if site A has to provide feeds to 500 search sites then that might also be overloading it - so cache-and-forward might be a better strategy. But that's an implementation detail.

[matgb]

You need every producing site to ping every search site.

No, you need to have a couple sites providing a pinging service, like Auttommatic does with ping-o-matic. Then you, the user, chose which pinging service to use.

Which also means they all have to keep track of every search site out there.

No, the pinging service does that for you.

And most blog platforms already provide feeds for a huge number of search services, sort of—every RSS reader in the world is effectively acting as a search service to an extent.

Actually, given that Twitter already has a huge pile of published APIs, and a lot of people are used to using clients already, the impetus for a distributed model is pretty much already there, all it'd need is for Twitter to have an outage and people'll step in.

[andrewducker]

Ok, so DuckerTwitter.Com pings the ping site of its choice, and then the search sites use that as a trigger to come get data from DuckerTwitter.com? Or do I send the complete data to the ping site?